


Inherent Singularity

by Coiriuil



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-07
Packaged: 2018-02-07 22:13:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,424
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1915779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Coiriuil/pseuds/Coiriuil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim Moriarty had been watching Sherlock for a very long time indeed. For Jim, it has been a lifelong game of hide and seek, for Sherlock, well....Brilliant as he is, you wouldn't believe how ignorant he can sometimes be. He'd never noticed the trailing shadow, not until it was given a name, not until the spider came out to play for the first time, not in the shadows, but in the light of day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Inherent Singularity

**Author's Note:**

> Not spectaculary shippy yet, but do stay tuned. Victor Trevor and Mycroft mentioned briefly, and John Watson and Sherlock's relationship is strictly platonic.

It was….. _Intoxicating_ , really.

How many times was the bastard going to call the police station?

James was caught between the odd desire to break the boy’s skull, and the need to sit inside it, to drag his finger down the length of those clever little neurotransmitters, to pick apart his unsupported claim with nimble fingers until he could trace his thought process from point A to point B.

_They’re not **listening** , Sherlock. Silly little things, aren’t they?_

James smirked. He was paying very very close attention to his story in the paper.

His _fairy tale_.

And someone had gotten it, bless him.  
Sent in a letter every week, nearly. For a while.  
And sadly for the poor boy, for this silly little Sherlock Holmes…

No one was **listening**.

It must be so very disturbing, James thought, being right, knowing that you’re right..And being unable to make people see how utterly infallible you are.

He fiddled with the laces on the shoes he’d kept.

Evidence.Trophy. Whathaveyou.  
He bit his bottom lip.

“You _got_ it. Clever boy…”

\----

Sherlock knotted his fingers into his hair.

He was nine and he was livid, angry to the point of murder.

_stupidstupidstupidstupid_

How can they be so utterly **_stupid_**?

It all made sense to Sherlock. The answer presented itself in sharp relief, and Mycroft saw, and he saw, so why couldn’t anyone else?

A _swimmer_ doesn’t _drown_ in a **_pool._**

particularly not a swimmer whose shoes have gone missing.

Shoes. _Shoes_. They had to be the answer. The missing skeleton key that made it all right, all of it incurably, **_obviously_** right.

Eventually, his letters stopped being addressed in the paper. There was nothing for it, anyway. Papers were nothing more than fairy tales

And pretty boring ones, at that.

Soon enough, Sherlock is ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, and damn if the world isn’t as boring and tiresome is ever. He can’t help but see. Friends are a hassle he is proud to claim he doesn’t have to contend with, as any who’d shown him kindness he deduced into frigid disdain.

He didn’t need them.

Friends were a baggage he couldn’t suffer himself to carry. He anguished in his day to day, avoiding father in the hallways, drumming his fingertips on the walls. Nothing was ever as soothing as _taptaptaptaptapta_ p. On that same note, nothing was ever as **tedious**. He took to wondering then. Why, Mycroft? Why do our hearts beat, what is it for? No. Forget those.

“Why do we breathe?"

_“We just do.”_

Sherlock never **'just did'** anything.  
\----  
James followed as best he could. After all, the boy was a hell of a distraction. Why, Why, Why. Always Why. Sometimes how, but usually ‘Why’. Always asking questions. James was nearing seventeen, and Sherlock was close behind. However, while Sherlock amused himself with sneaking cigarettes behind the school, and only kissing mouths that had nothing special to say, James had been working, expanding. He needed to be big enough, bad enough, good enough, _worthy_ enough, to draw that cerulean gaze.

**_‘Cerulean.’_** How utterly pretentious.

It wasn’t healthy, James ~~Jim, now, to his..business partners~~ , had decided, long ago. He supposed it was rather frowned upon to dedicate the majority of your life to watching one boy, not inherently singular in comparison to any other, from afar.

But then, perhaps he was…..

_Inherently **singular**_ , that is.

Nevertheless, Jim’s hands curled over the map,the politicians, stock brokers, killers, sinners, heroes, saints, dangling from his fingertips, puppets on a wire.

They really were _adorable_.

Jim had decided long, long, long ago-

That some things were worth toiling for. And catching this one’s attention just might be.

Apart from that, bloody hell, was it amusing. Jim could hardly contain himself. Here he was at seventeen, sitting pretty atop a heap of dirty politicians, bent rules, a thousand skeletons in a thousand closets and enough corpses to dam the Thames. Only one of which, mind you, did he legitimately touch. And that was a cold case, thanks to the incompetency of New Scotland Yard, and the blatant disregard of one inherently singular young man.

Now, interestingly enough, as fate would have it, the being rising opposite of him, the spearhead of Britain’s apparent new world order-

Was none other than Mycroft Holmes.

Now this fact.. Had James positively **_tickled_**. How... _quaint_. It was nearly _Romeo and Juliet_. Jim the timeless Montague, and his Sherlock…

The unattainable Capulet.

His brother the White Knight of the new age, And Jim, the Proverbial Shadow.

“Hmm.”

His empire still needed expanding. Sherlock wasn’t ready yet, anyway. He was still angst ridden, and complacent, resting ever so frustratingly _below_ his full potential.

That just wouldn’t do.

\----

It’s his first year of uni, And Sherlock’s mind is on fire. It’s so frustrating being the only rational, practical, actual _ **intelligent**_ life in the room. The Hall. The campus. The _world_.

His thoughts were spinning much too fast, unraveling like a spool tilted out of hand, disintegrating like spiderwebs in hydrogen peroxide, scattering like beetles in fluorescent light.

_**Similes**?_

_What have you become, Sherlock?_

He’s forced to room with a man who seemed to possess _scarcely_ two brain cells. Or so Sherlock thought. Until one day he’s coming home and the boy is laid out on the floor, and he’s telling Sherlock how the colour purple tastes and that stars are sad because they aren’t on fire, but they’re burning to death all the same.

And damn, that makes a strange kind of sense.

Victor shows him the universe, and it comes conveniently packaged in a little cylinder...Just push down to deliver. Lo and behold the great unknown is suddenly incredibly known and for the first time in his life, Sherlock can hear his fingernails growing, and the color Blue tastes too much like home , but that’s alright because his brain is ** _electric_**.

Sherlock is twenty-one, his veins are filled with icy fire, and his mouth is dryer than the Sahara, until Victor’s tongue assuages the issue.

Morphine isn’t all there is, as Sherlock comes to know. But it’s good, and it’s his favorite.

Except for maybe cocaine.

Cocaine fired him up, but not the way the other things do. He can catch his thoughts as they pass him now, pick at the seams until the fabric crumbles, a heap on his lap that he can sort through at his leisure. The only issue is that when he crashes, Cocaine makes him crash the hardest.

That was simple though, he thinks.

Just. Never. **_Crash_**.

 

Victor ties a damn good tourniquet, in fact, he ties up a lot of things damn well. Like Sherlock, for instance. He doesn’t mind it. He doesn’t feel anything.

That’s a bit of a lie. Of course he feels _something_ , but that can be contributed singularly to endorphins, and **_anyone_** can cause neuron to fire.

Sherlock wants someone to make his brain shut up.

He has to stop with the Cocaine. Because Sherlock is twenty-three, and uni seems like another lifetime from his spot on the streets, Victor’s mouth slightly agape as they rough it underneath overpasses, or in the doorways of abandoned shops. Sherlock’s mind is still electric, but now it feels like an agonizingly slow execution instead of a Zap, a Rush. It seems like no matter how hard the times, Vic can always find a bump. Sherlock leaves him in the morning. He thinks it’s a Saturday. But maybe it’s Thursday.

_Who cares?_

A car pulls up by the curb a block away, and Sherlock slides in without a thought.

Mycroft’s newest assistant is a woman with dark hair and a nose glued to the screen of her mobile, but Sherlock doesn’t really care. Mycroft doesn’t come to see him. He has him taken to a hairdresser, and then a blank parody of a flat, with white walls and grey furniture that was practically begging to be burned.

Which he did, of course.

One should _always_ have a matchbook handy..

He didn’t realize that there weren’t any windows, and that Nameless Brunette had locked the door when she left.

 

The withdrawals hit him like a freight train.

It had never occurred to Sherlock that something could cause him such pain. He supposed he developed some sort of an invincibility complex, but none of that particularly mattered as he screamed and clawed his way through One Hundred and Seventy- Two hours of bone breaking pain, accentuated by three meals shoved through a flap beneath the door at random points throughout the day. None of which, did he eat. The white hallway had more than a few smears of blood on it, as Sherlock had mistakenly identified his heart as a traitor, and attempted to claw it from his own chest.

Just before the passing of the One hundred and Seventy- Third hour, as Sherlock sat on the floor with his head in hand, the door creaked. Sherlock’s eyes snapped open, a sigh escaping him. He’d been relatively calm for that day, as well as the one preceding, and he was confident at this point that the only toxin left in his body was a case of cabin fever.

“You’re free to go.”

And he did, with little more than a nod toward the immaculately dressed individual with the umbrella in his hand.

\----

He had blood on his hands again. And this time, he hadn’t bothered with intimidation, or theatrics, or _drama_.

This time, James is twenty-three, and the corpse on the ground before him is responsible for the dimming of the only mind that mattered.

He was holding his heart. He turned it over and over in his hands, his upper lip curling in slight disdain as he tried to understand what ordinary people found so interesting about it.

It’s only a **_muscle_**.

After that, Jim looked for him for days. He had watched the tape as he slid into to unlicensed vehicle, and hadn’t caught sight of him since.

Vanished, without a fucking trace.

Until two weeks later when he walked out of New Scotland yard with a smirk on his face and a confident traipse.

"Bastard. Alive then, I see. "

Jim swiveled in his office chair, fingertips drumming the desk.

_Now?_

_No. He’s still not ready. Too arrogant. Not good enough yet._

In less than a week Sherlock is unstoppable. Out and about, to and from St. Barts and the Yard, busy with what Jim comes to know is his self-created profession ‘Consulting Detective.’

James smirks.

_So he likes solving murders._

_Let’s give him something to **do**._  
\----

Sherlock is twenty-nine when Lestrade finds him curled up in a ditch, Hypodermic still embedded in the crook of his arm. This time there is no discretion. Lestrade has him admitted and Sherlock spends a month and a half locked in a hospital that smells of disinfectant and death.

He hates it. And yet, somehow it is better than a rudimentary apartment outfitted with blood and _mod_ _furniture_. Sherlock learns not to complain about the meals they force him to ‘eat’, instead hiding it into napkins and faking a smile.

When he is released, his flat has been let to someone else, and Mycroft insists he finds another on his own. Something about learning responsibility, how to be a proper adult. Sherlock reminds him that Mycroft still calls their mother ‘Mummy’.

It’s a week of sleeping on park benches, with pointed glares at the CCTV cameras, before he finds a place.  
He stays there for a bit, but eventually, the skittering of mice proves to be too much, and he bounces around London for years before an opening makes itself known.

It’s let by a woman whose husband he essentially killed, and she has loved him like a son ever since.

Sherlock is thirty-four, and Mrs. Hudson is **_not_** his housekeeper.

 

A stroke of luck finds him a flatmate, and a stroke of destiny makes him a friend.

Sherlock is….

Content.

\----

James has watched so many come and go. However, this new arrival certainly came, but he has yet to see him go.

He can’t decide how he ** _feels_ ** about it.

So instead he plans something _gorgeous_ for him. For **_Sherlock_**.

The name rolls off his tongue **_so_** well...

Something the pretty little detective would skip over completely, never noticing just how silly he was until Jim decided to tell him what he missed.  
It’s simple really, the setup. Sherlock is already so blind, so dismissive of the obvious facts in favor of a more complicated, convoluted scenario. It’s easy for Jim to lay the trap, and when the time comes to make contact with Sherlock, he tells the woman to call Sherlock exactly what he is.

  
“H-hello... _sexy_..”

  
Her voice is too shaky and insincere for Jim’s taste, but she’ll have to do. He’s not quite ready for Sherlock to see him.

He doesn’t deserve it yet.

  
\----

  
At thirty-six Sherlock is on fire, much unlike the stars, and someone called _Moriarty_ has weaved the most stunning, distracting tapestry that the detective had ever seen, his brain is at once overwhelmed and perfectly suited for this, the perfect crime.

The perfect **_criminal_**.

It’s beautiful, the time and care put into every thread of the man’s web, each faction precise and choreographed to the second.

God It’s beautiful.

Until it isn’t.  
\----

“How’s that fit, Johnny Boy?”

Jim chuckles at the pet name, reaching out to tug the ridiculously fluffy coat tighter around the army doctor, watching as his arms twitch forward, intent to hurt him, until the barrell of Sebastian’s gun presses more insistently into the back of his skull. His arms settled by his side, and Jim laughs softly, tilting his head at the doctor, lower lip poking out mockingly.

  
“ _Relax_ , darling. I’m only going to blow you up if Sherlock **offends** me.”

The doctor blanches, and Jim can practically read the _‘Fuck, I’m fucked..’_ on John’s features. The opening of the door echoes throughout the poolroom, reverberating through the soles of Jim’s feet, his eyes closing for a long blissful second, overwhelmed with the knowledge that Sherlock is so  
 ** _ fucking close_**.  
He opens his eyes then, breathing in through his nose and walking around John, his fingers tracing over his chest as he comes to a halt behind him, giving a slight push forward.

“Go get him, _Johnny_.”

He murmured low in his ear, watching John step into Sherlock’s line of sight before turning, disappearing through the back, making his way to where he intended to make his grand entrance.


End file.
